Tessellation is the process of decomposing a three-dimensional curved surface into small discrete triangles which are referred to as shards. The size of each shard is determined by the screen space projection of the representation.
Tessellation refers to the process of breaking a high level surface description, such as a curved surface, mesh or fractal, into simple two-dimensional representations. A tessellator for a particular type of geometry contains routines for separating that particular geometry into renderable shards.
Samples are actual points on the surface of an object which is being tessellated. Each sample is one of three types of points: (i) a three-dimensional point on the surface, (ii) a normal, and (iii) a parametric coordinate of the object. Device specific samples contain additional information such as color and fixed point screen coordinates. A shard is formed by simply linking a set of three samples for a given area of a surface.
Current graphic systems undertake a complex and lengthy process, usually involving the large amounts of computation, in order to convert a three-dimensional surface into a two-dimensional display. This follows since current methods employ approaches that result in the creation and utilization of different and redundant code for various geometric primitives. Such graphic systems also may depict cracks or require costly computationally intensive techniques to remove the cracks between different areas of the same surface areas and between similar surfaces which are joined together. Thus, the prior art that applicant is aware of provides a graphic system that is inefficient for rendering two-dimensional representations from three-dimensional surfaces.